Ajay Jaiswal

Much of the principles of management studied today are considered to have been established in the past three centuries. The very term 'management' has been often viewed as a concept of late modernity. However, one may also may contend that management principles have existed for millennia and great philosophers and sages from antiquity have to this discipline explicitly and implicitly. One such perennial source of inspiration to all the scholars and practitioners of management could be the Bhagvadgītā (hereafter as the BG), a foundational text of Indian philosophy of Vedānta. In this paper, an attempt has been made to propound the BG as a text of the philosophy of management along with some illustrations and a reflection on the concepts of philosophy and management. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part attempts to provide a working definition of philosophy and investigate the BG as a text of philosophy. In the second part, the BG is also analyzed in terms of the philosophy of management. In the third and final part, followed by the conclusion, the paper puts forwards some of the foundational principles of the philosophy of management that we can learn from the BG.